MySpace “cyber bully mom” will stand trial in LA

Lori Drew will soon go on trial, accused of fatally "cyber bullying" a young …

She was thirteen years old and thought that she was having a MySpace online romance with a sixteen-year-old boy named "Josh Evans." Four weeks later, "Josh" broke off correspondence, allegedly telling the girl that the world would be a better place without her. In response, she hung herself and died a day later.

Now the Department of Justice says that "Josh" was really Lori Drew, 49, of O'Fallon, Missouri. Drew will stand trial in Los Angeles, accused of providing false information to get a MySpace account and violating MySpace terms to harass and harm other people—specifically, a girl the DOJ will only identify as "M.T.M." The accused faces a maximum of 20 years in prison.

"Whether we characterize this tragic case as 'cyber-bullying,' cyber abuse or illegal computer access, it should serve as a reminder that our children use the Internet for social interaction and that technology has altered the way they conduct their daily activities," said LA FBI Assistant Director Salvador Hernandez. "As adults, we must be sensitive to the potential dangers posed by the use of the Internet by our children."

But the latest research suggests that this awful exchange is not typical of the troubling encounters that take place between adults and kids on the 'Net. Most of those interactions also don't end very well, but they are neither deceitful nor fatal.

Myths and realities

If you think that the typical Internet sex scofflaw lies about his or her age, pretends to be another child, then tricks the boy or girl into a secret tryst, think again, say a group of researchers at the Crimes Against Children Research Center (CACRC).

"The research about Internet-initiated sex crimes makes it clear that the stereotype of the Internet child molester who uses trickery and violence to assault children is largely inaccurate," they assert. Most such crimes are committed by men who access web sites to seduce teenagers, and in the overwhelming majority of these cases, these teens know that they are conversing with adults. Only five percent of the adult offenders pretend to be the age of the teenager with whom they are corresponding.

"Also, offenders rarely deceive victims about their sexual interests," CACRC says, "the sex is usually broached online, and most victims who meet offenders face-to-face go to such meetings expecting to engage in sexual activity." When prosecuted, most of these adults face charges of statutory rape.

Popular media stories often suggest that naive and very young children have the most to fear from child molesters. But 99 percent of the victims in one study ranged from 13 through 17 years in age. And the teens who take the most risks in these encounters fall into the 15 through 17 years-old age category.

CACRC finds, not surprisingly, that one of the biggest factors leading teenagers into these kind of online relationships is a troubled situation at home, especially if that situation involves instability, abuse, or depression. "Some such youth may be vulnerable to online sexual advances because they are looking for attention and affection," the group explains.

Some good news: social networking sites like MySpace don't seem to have made the situation worse. Posting on such sites doesn't make a teen vulnerable. Instead, "it is interactive behaviors, such as conversing online with unknown people about sex, that more clearly create risk." And the adults who troll the 'Net for teenagers are rarely violent and they almost never abduct their victims. "About one-quarter of the cases started with missing persons reports because victims ran away to be with offenders or lied to parents about their whereabouts," CACRC says. "So, in many cases, abduction may have been feared."

Some bad news: about 20 percent of the adults who solicit these teens often take photographs or videos of them. "If youth comply with such requests," CACRC warns, "solicitors and others can circulate the images widely online with no possibility that circulation can be curtailed."

Has the Internet encouraged criminal sexual behavior against children and teens? CACRC says no. In fact, from 1990 through 2005 the number of sexual abuse cases reported by child protective authorities has gone down. More research needs to be done on Internet sexual abuse, but "it is premature to talk about the Internet as an established facilitator of sex crimes, beyond the possession and distribution of child pornography."

Public misconceptions about teens, adults, and the Internet have made it difficult to protect teens from web-initiated encounters that may not involve abduction or violence, but almost always end up badly. CACRC isn't worried about parents who need to be educated about these risks, but teenagers. They need to know, as CACRC puts it, that it "is normal to have strong sexual feelings, but wrong for adults to provoke or exploit these feelings, especially with youth who are inexperienced in coping with sexual desire and intimate relationships."

And the public needs to know that the typical adult/teen Internet encounter is a lot more complex than the tragic case of Lori Drew and "M.T.M."

Further reading:

Matthew Lasar / Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.